D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
March 2010
Glove Story
When your blood thins and you put on a coat to open the freezer, the Southwest has made you a weather wimp.
Is it spring yet?
I know I shouldn't complain about the recent (and, one can only pray, mostly over) unusually cold and snowy winter. Other places, after all, have had it much worse. The nation's capital has been blizzarded so often that the squabbling over health care has been replaced by debate over whether to call the snowstorms "Snowmaggeddon" or "Snowpocalypse." (The Republicans apparently are holding out for "Snowbama" and blaming the president for being soft on El Niño. Newly elected Massachusetts senator and ex-Cosmo centerfold Scott Brown is arguing that he's hot enough to melt the snow. And Sarah Palin is touting her Alaska experience as just what the country needs to deal with cold and snow. Besides, her record as a quitter is perfect for snow days.)
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Cacti covered with
snow — does anybody else see a problem with this?? (Photos by Lisa D. Fryxell) |
Back home in South Dakota where I grew up, the sort of winter we've just endured would have been considered a laugher, if not an outright gift from the Almighty. Not a single day below zero! Never did the snow reach the second-story windows!
Heck, this morning when I woke up and obsessively checked the remote weather station, it was a balmy 27 degrees. A reading of 27 — above, that is — in South Dakota in February would be cause to break out the swimsuits and Hawaiian shirts. And that was probably the low for the day — it will warm into the 40s. Weatherbeaten old Norwegians would be serving the holiday herring and holding a special service of thanksgiving down at the Lutheran church if the mercury climbed into the 40s in South Dakota before Easter.
I'm not even sure my fancy-dancy LCD weather gizmo is capable of recording temperatures as low as what South Dakotans consider a "warm front" in January. "Look, Sven, it's 15 below! I sure hope the lutefisk doesn't thaw out, what with this warm weather we're havin'. Maybe that Al Gore fella was onto somethin' with that global-warming talk."
It's not just the extremes that make winter so hard to handle back where I come from, but the duration. No kidding, the year we moved back to Minnesota — what were we thinking? — they'd had a blizzard on Halloween. That snow, once it got comfy in nice pillow-like heaps along the roadsides and covered with a lovely layer of grime and soot, stuck around until April. By January, after a few dozen more blizzards, the street crews simply threw up their hands and four-lane roads became two lanes. Parking-meter revenues plummeted as the heads of the meters were consumed by the ever-growing snow piles.
Up there, winter starts early and goes late. Easter blizzards weren't uncommon, and every Mother's Day Minnesotans fretted whether the ice would be out on the lakes for the governor's traditional fishing opener. (That's right — they started the fishing season on Mother's Day. Thoughtful, huh? "Look, honey, I bought you some bait for your big day! Well, gotta go.")
But after seven years of living in southern New Mexico, I've become a winter-weather wimp. There, I said it. I'm not proud of it, but my blood has thinned. My tolerance for snow has melted to nearly zero. My reaction to ice and sleet, already in the red zone, has altered to the apocalyptic. I'm not even all that fond of popsicles any more.
I don't know what happens to transplanted Northerners down here. Maybe that's why Santa Fe is so popular — it gets enough winter to keep you hardy. But Silver City is just balmy enough, the typical winter so comparatively painless, that it makes people soft. And Las Cruces? One flake and folks act like it's a chunk of the sky that's falling. Close the schools! Hide the women and children! Call out the National Guard! Put thermal blankets on the cacti!
To be fair, the winter of 2009-2010 has been unusually harsh hereabouts, if not exactly of "Snowmageddon" proportions. The other day a woman who lives up toward Pinos Altos told me she'd been here 50 years and she couldn't remember ever having so much snow. People who keep track of such things say the snowpack is something like 80% higher than normal. Other folks say colder and snowier winters were commonplace a decade or so ago, and we're just getting back to "normal" here. (Hmmm. Aruba Exposure has a nice ring to it.)
In any case, the pile of bags for the pellet stove has been shrinking alarmingly, after a couple of years when it seemed we'd never get that part of the garage back for summer. Every afternoon, too, I trudge out to the woodpile and restock the firewood bin, wearing a thick denim coat, lined in plaid, that I joke makes me look like Timmy's dad from the old "Lassie" TV show. ("Guess I'd better go rescue Timmy from the well again. Dang kid can't keep from falling in.") And the PNM bills look like the electricity tab for a small country.
Faithful readers will recall that one of the reasons we picked Silver City over such supposedly tonier places as Santa Fe and Taos was that it's far enough south not to get enough snow to ski in. Admittedly, the elevation here makes winter chillier than nearby but lower spots like Deming or Las Cruces — but the cooler temperatures are a welcome tradeoff come July. And the first few winters here we laughed off the occasional dusting of snow as pathetic, a joke. You call that "snow"? Back in South Dakota we have dandruff deeper than that!
But then we got spoiled. Grilling outdoors for Christmas dinner. Running to Albertson's in January without throwing a jacket on, or fetching the morning paper while still in pajamas. Leaving the lawn furniture out back all year, because — you never know — there might be a day or two in February when you could use it. Seriously contemplating wearing shorts on a warm day in March.
That's how winter-weather wimps are made. You get lulled into thinking every winter will be mild and dry. Those childhood winters up north, frozen inside from October to May, slowly fade from your memory. Pretty soon you start recoiling from snowglobes — brrr! You can't even watch holiday classics like It's a Wonderful Life or A Christmas Story, because they make you feel cold. Defrosting the freezer becomes a chore put off until summer. You seriously think about disconnecting the ice-cube maker — too many bad memories of ice.
We're still not as wimpy as people in places like Tucson, though. When we were there earlier this winter and the evening temperature dipped into the 50s, I went out wearing a light jacket, not even bothering to zip it up. The natives, though, broke out their winter coats — fur-lined parkas, puffy coats with hoods, stocking caps. Who even owns a coat like that if you live in Tucson? And come on, an Arizona Cardinals stocking cap is an oxymoron.
So I guess I still have a little winter tolerance left, a ways to go before becoming a complete wimp and buying one of those wearable blankets you see on infomercials. (You know the ones I mean — they make you look like a monk who's been attacked by a fleece monster.)
Just to toughen up and prevent further decline into wimpdom, maybe I won't even wear my heavy "Lassie" coat when I go out to fetch the firewood today. Timmy will have to fend for himself.
It's too dang cold to be playing outside, anyway.
Desert Exposure editor David A. Fryxell keeps warm by typing furiously.